Chapter 19
Hoping to beat the incoming storm, Devine drove straight back to where Jenny’s body had been found and walked the area with a soldier’s eye for detail.
He stood at the spot where the shell casing had been found. The .300 Norma magnum round was mostly, but not exclusively, used by the military and its snipers. The casing had been next to a stand of bare trees, providing some good cover. He had noted all of that before. He drew a sight line between the ejected casing and the spot where Jenny had been standing before toppling over the edge after being shot.
Or so the story goes.
He lay prone on the ground and pantomimed taking aim at Jenny Silkwell.
He pulled the invisible trigger and counted three beats. The bullet would have hit her in the blink of an eye from this distance, but it would have taken a few beats for her to fall over the edge and hit the rocks below.
He stood and pulled out his phone. He’d had the medical examiner, Françoise Guillaume, email him the preliminary autopsy report. As he read it, the weather system coming in off the coast had raised the temperature enough to where the precipitation that started to fall was rain, and not sleet or snow.
He caught himself smiling. Alex Silkwell would get to teach her art class today.
He hustled back to the Tahoe and reached it before it really started to pour. He sat there staring at a crime scene that had definite shakiness to its outlines, and thus its substance.
He texted Campbell with his theories and waited for a reply.
He got it five minutes later, a testament to how such a busy man, with a dozen missions like Devine’s to oversee, was laser-focused on this one. But it was no doubt the only mission under his command that had to do with a man who had saved his life. As a former soldier Devine got that one really well. It forged a bond stronger than just about everything else in life.
Campbell’s advice was explicit:
Follow your gut and keep things close to the vest. Dak Silkwell’s military file is sealed. I cannot break through it as yet. And Curt never talked to me about his son’s military career, and why he left, and I never asked. Stay tuned. It is critical to find her government laptop and personal phone, Devine. Ulcers are forming in people’s guts here.
He knew that if someone had taken those devices, then Devine might be looking at a stranger having killed Jenny in order to get some intel from her. They had checked the secure cloud of her government-issued computer and personal phone and found nothing unusual, nor had there been any attempts to hack into them. And there had been no calls, emails, or texts that would foreshadow her being murdered. If she had communicated with anyone about her trip here, she had not done so electronically on her personal or government devices.
Being an ops officer, she knew the pitfalls of sending anything over the internet. But she could have used a burner phone or prepaid phone card and left no trail. She had no social media accounts at all, not unusual for someone with her occupation.
He sent a brief reply to Campbell, put the Tahoe in gear, and fought the wind and rain to his next destination.
Earl Palmer’s house.
Chapter 20
The rain started to ease some as Devine pulled onto the long gravel drive. In the daylight everything looked different as he wound back through a thick stand of bare woods with cluttered undergrowth. The long limbs swayed, dipped, and creaked in the stiff breeze that had never been absent since Devine had stepped foot in Putnam.
The little cottage appeared to him in the middle of the woods. Coupled with the inclement weather, the place had an ominous sensibility to it, like something out of a Brothers Grimm violent yarn masquerading as a fairy tale. In the light he could see that it was white clapboard with faded green shutters, just as the man who had confronted Devine outside the bar had said it would be. He eyed the ancient station wagon again. And the F150 looked even older. The truck bed was filled with old tools, long metal rods, what looked to be a small concrete mixer, rolls of fish netting and rope, and grimy buoys.
Next to the house, on a small rusty trailer, was a wooden dinghy with a name neatly stenciled on the side.
He got out of the car and drew close enough to see.
BERTIE’S BOAT.
Named after his dead wife.
Behind the house was a small building with curtained windows that he hadn’t noticed on his previous night’s recon.
He stepped up to the porch and was about to knock when the door opened and he was staring at the business end of an over-and-under shotgun.
Earl Palmer stood there in a red thermal underwear shirt and soiled dungarees, white socks on shoeless feet. He had about an inch in height on Devine and looked ruggedly strong with a barrel chest and long arms that tapered to slender hips and thin, bowed legs. Not bad for a man in his latter seventies, thought Devine. But lobster fishing demanded a lot of physical strength, he reckoned.
Up close he looked like a taller, broader Robert Frost, thought Devine, who had read the man’s poetry at West Point. His comrades at the Point had teased him about this, until some pretty local girls they had gone into town to see had told them that they found an interest in poetry incredibly attractive in a man. All the way back to West Point the guys had pestered him for details on some of Frost’s best-known lines that they could use for their own pickup efforts.
“‘Two roads diverged in the woods and I, I took the one less traveled,’” he had told them. He had learned that the line was often misinterpreted because Frost had regrets in his life and had not actually taken that road. When his buddies asked him what it meant he said, with all sincerity, “We chose a path almost no one else does. We’re going to risk our lives to protect our country and way of life. We chose the most honorable journey and also the most dangerous. It’s a selfless act of sacrifice in a country that routinely worships individualism over the collective.”
None of them had expected that response, he could tell. Hell, he still didn’t know exactly from where inside him those words had come. They had ridden the rest of the way back in silence, each man seemingly lost in thought over what Devine had said.
Devine had lost four of his classmates to war, including one in their group from that night, and three more to suicide after tours of duty that had forced them to see and do things that people should not have to ever see or do.
“Who are you?” Palmer said in a steady, calm voice that put Devine more on edge than if the man had been screaming. “I don’t know you. What are you doing on my property?”
“Travis Devine. I’m with Homeland Security. I’m here investigating Jenny Silkwell’s murder. I wanted to ask you a few questions, if I may.”
“Let me see some ID. Slow,” Palmer added.
Devine tentatively reached into his coat pocket and produced his identification.
“Hold it up high so I can see it.”
Devine did so and Palmer studied it at eye level before reluctantly lowering his weapon.
“What do you want to know?”
“Can we do this inside?” said Devine as the rain started up again. The porch had no roof, so he was getting the full effect.
Palmer stepped aside and motioned him in with the gun muzzle. Then he closed the door and pointed Devine into the room overlooking the front yard.
It was small and minimally furnished, but as neat and organized as, well, a ship’s cabin, concluded Devine. There was a woodstove that was generating considerable and welcome warmth. On a wooden shelf bolted to the wall were pictures of various people. Devine saw a younger Annie and what were probably her parents. And hugging Earl Palmer was, no doubt, his wife, Alberta. They looked about as much in love as a couple could be. And that picture was fairly recent, he could tell.